The Rebranded Teacher
The Rebranded Teacher
How to Earn More Money as a Teacher in 2024
Discover how educators can transform their teaching skills into valuable entrepreneurial ventures, as Lauren Fulton shares her inspiring journey from classroom to commerce. Uncover the secrets to making your educational resources work for you by setting up a thriving Teachers Pay Teachers store, even if you're new to the market. Lauren offers a candid look at her own experiences, discussing the challenges she faced and the rewarding path of monetizing her classroom creations. With her guidance, you’ll get a roadmap to supplement your income while doing what you love.
But the opportunities don’t stop at digital classrooms. Tap into the world of content creation without needing an existing audience. Learn how to create captivating short-form videos for brands, write engaging blog posts, and build recurring revenue streams with your unique talents. For those eager to collaborate and connect, Lauren opens the door to networking opportunities with like-minded individuals and invites you to join a supportive community on Facebook. Whether you're a seasoned educator or just starting out, this episode is packed with strategies to boost your financial success in the education sector and beyond.
My YouTube Channel
https://www.youtube.com/@LaurenFulton
TPT Virtual Assistant Facebook Group
https://www.facebook.com/share/g/1AW1fK6uyc/
My Email
lauren@therebrandedteacher.com
Welcome to the Rebranded Teacher Podcast. My name is Lauren Fulton. I'm a full-time teacher, author and seller on Teachers, pay Teachers, and I help other teacher entrepreneurs grow their TPT businesses in a way that's purposeful and sustainable. So if you're looking for actionable, step-by-step ways to grow your business, you're in the right place. Let's get started it. Let's talk about how to earn more money as a teacher in 2024. And moving on into the next school year, in 2025.
Speaker 1:Things are looking a little uncertain right now. The cost of groceries are increasing, gas is astronomical, and let's not even talk about property taxes and all of that mess. Life is just getting a whole lot more expensive, and if you are a teacher and you're looking for ways to make more money with the skills that you already have, I've got three really great options for you. I'm going to start with the one that some of you may already be doing, if you're listening to this podcast or you're watching this YouTube video, and that is selling your resources on Teachers, pay Teachers. Now, if you're like, don't think that's for me, keep on listening, because there are two other options that don't involve creating your own store and selling your own resources and having to do your own marketing and all that good stuff. Okay, but let's start with this. Let's start with something that a lot of teachers are already doing, and that is taking resources that you've created, like watching on YouTube. I'm going to show you an example. Like this little resource right here looks really scribbled on because my toddler did it but taking resources that you're already using for your kids or using for your students and prettying them up, getting them ready and just polishing them and selling them on.
Speaker 1:Teachers Pay Teachers. So these can be resources that you're creating for your students. Or if you're a homeschool mom, former teacher, these can be resources that you're creating for your kids. Or even if you're a teacher and you're just creating things for your kids because we do that right A lot of times, we'll create things for our students at school and then we'll come home and we'll make things for our kids because we do that right A lot of times. We'll create things for our students at school and then we'll come home and we'll make things for our kids when they need a little extra help, and so these can be anything that you're already doing. We can put it to good use and we can actually sell it, because there's a good chance that another teacher or another parent is going to want something similar to what you're creating, and this is how I got started in the teacher business world back in 2016. I had created some.
Speaker 1:Actually, I think my very first resource was a zombie apocalypse classroom transformation where my students use exponential growth and decay and create exponential equations to figure out the spread of the zombie disease and then how to like combat that by spreading an antidote that would keep you from turning into a zombie if you got bitten or whatever it was. I can't even at this point I can't even remember how zombies transfer their zombiness, but whatever you get the point, I created this resource. It was a three-day classroom transformation and it included some videos as hooks to go alongside of the three days worth of lessons, and students were kind of immersed into this zombie apocalypse type world and had to write math equations in order to escape, right. So this was my very first resource that I actually put on Teachers, pay Teachers and my other resource was like a whodunit clue style mystery where students solve systems of equations to figure out whodunit. Very simple, very basic resources, but they were things that I wanted inside of my classroom that I wasn't finding on TPT. I wanted my students to step into my classroom and feel like they walked into a different world and feel like they were solving math problems for a reason, even if it was just for a game, and so I created these resources to fill a need in my classroom. And then I just took them and added some covers, some terms of use pages, prettied them up a little bit Honestly back then not very much, but prettied them up a little bit and then put them on TPT to sell.
Speaker 1:And it took a little while with that kind of strategy that I had going on, where it's just like take what I make, polish it up a little bit, throw it on TPT and don't do anything else. It took a little while to start making some substantial income, but after several months to a year I started to really learn what buyers were liking, what other teachers were enjoying from the resources that I was creating. So I started to create more and more of those types of resources and ultimately I started my store in the summer of 2016, piddled around with it, but I was able to leave the classroom in the spring of 2019 and I was out earning my teaching salary, and I've been on TPT ever since and now even have a second store where I sell resources that I created for my preschooler. And trust me when I say that if you are a teacher, there's room for you in that market. It's not oversaturated.
Speaker 1:I think a lot of teachers are afraid to pursue that as a way to make money. Number one, because it's not income right away. It requires some patience, that is true. But they're also a little bit afraid that maybe the market is oversaturated and there are areas of oversaturation inside the market. But I entered the preschool space and there has been a space for me there. So if there's a space in preschool, then I promise there's a space for anyone. So definitely number one is if you want to have your own business, tpt is a really great place to start. However, as I mentioned just a second ago, it is not going to be something that's going to start making you thousands of dollars right away or even hundreds of dollars right away. For most people, it takes a little while to really take off, especially because you're a teacher and so you're doing this part time.
Speaker 1:There are a couple of options that a lot of people don't talk about, and I want to share them with you if you're a teacher business owner or even already selling on TPT. These are some ways that you can make money instead of selling on Teachers Pay Teachers or as you wait for your own TPT store to take off. And the second thing is create resources for other sellers. So, for example, every probably year or so, I am hiring math writers inside of my business, where I give teachers templates and from those templates, they insert or write math problems and create more resources for me because I don't have the time to create resources anymore. I've hired several math writers and actually most of them already sell on Teachers Pay Teachers, but they're also on my email list and I open it up to classroom teachers, to teachers who are still in the classroom, to TPT business owners. Open it up to everyone and that generally pays. I'm going to say, depending on what niche you're in, you can make $50 an hour or more creating resources for other sellers.
Speaker 1:Now, that said, you have to kind of wait till someone posts a job and they're looking for that, or you can do something that I'm going to suggest that I've never heard anyone suggest before, but I'm going to throw it out here in just a second. But if you're looking for jobs in that market. I'm going to post a link to a VA group, a virtual assistant group for TPT business owners, and there are a lot of virtual assistant jobs within the TPT space, including writing curriculum or helping to produce curriculum for teacher authors, and you can find a link to that Facebook group where they have all kinds of rules. But you can mark it like one time you can share your services or you can find where other business owners are posting about jobs that they're offering. But if you join that group and you're not finding that there are a lot of people who are actively seeking.
Speaker 1:One thing you can think about if you create your own resources but maybe you don't want to sell them on TPT, maybe you want to make more money right away is you can think about creating, say, an original product line or original line of resources that instead of putting them in your own TPT store, you could offer them to different authors within your niche. So let's say you create math resources. You have a line of math resources that you think, okay, I don't have a big audience, so I could put this line of math resources on TPT and maybe over the course of the next year, these 10 products might make me a few hundred dollars. Or I can sell those 10 products to a TPT author for like 500 bucks and make that right away. That is something that me personally.
Speaker 1:If somebody came to me and they had a really unique product line idea and they were like, hey, I've created this line of resources. If somebody came to me and they had a really unique product line idea and they were like, hey, I've created this line of resources, if you would like to purchase the intellectual property rights to these resources and if you ever decide to expand on this in the future, then you have to pay me to create the expanded resources. But you can own the rights to the template. Like I'm not going to share this template with anybody else or I'm not going to sell these same rights to the template. Like I'm not gonna share this template with anybody else or I'm not gonna sell these same resources to anyone else.
Speaker 1:Like you could sell the intellectual property rights to someone for like $50 a piece for a little resource and I know that that is something that I would really be interested in if it was the right product, the right fit, and you could pitch it to different sellers until someone picks it up. So you could create one example product and say, hey, I'm going to be creating a line of resources for these topics, for this particular product that looks like this and you have to make sure your copyright is on it all that good stuff and say I will sell this to you and you can sell it inside of your store and I'll sell it to you for X amount of money, like, I'll do a package deal for you. You can retain the intellectual property rights. I'm not going to sell this type of resource to anybody else and if I ever make any future resources, I'll offer them to you. Or if you ever want to expand on this product line, you have to commission me to expand and create more resources.
Speaker 1:Whatever the package is, you can create some sort of offering and put that together, and I know personally I would really be interested in that and I can think of several other teacher authors who would also probably really be interested in that, because it takes a lot of time to come up with new and original ideas and then you have to hire somebody to create those resources and then you have to package them all together and get them listed, whereas if somebody just comes to me and they're like hey, I have a whole list of resources ready to go for you, I'll sell them to you. And if it makes really good sense financially and business-wise, then absolutely I'll do it, because I have the audience to market it to. But a lot of times I don't have the time to put everything together or to hire someone to put it together, to train them or whatever. So that is something you can think about doing and just offer it to one seller at a time. Just create one product, offer it to one seller at a time until you get someone who says yes, and then you go ahead and create the rest of those resources. Give that a try. You can try it on me if you want to, but give that a try and let me know if that works for you, because I think that this is something that we need more of in the teacher-author space, because it gives new authors the ability to create resources and get paid right away, and they don't have to sit around and wait and wonder if something's going to sell. They can create one resource and then get commissioned to create the rest of those products. Sell it to somebody else and then you make your money right away. And then that more established seller they pay for it. Right, so they're paying for that product. It's a win for them because they didn't have to come up with everything, they didn't have to oversee the creation of that and they didn't have to take the time to do it. And then they also have the established audience so they can make their money back fairly quickly, which is great. So it's a win-win situation.
Speaker 1:If, on the other hand, you're like okay, but I don't even like to create resources and I don't think that that's something that I'd be interested in, there are a lot of other ways that you can collaborate with TPT sellers to make money that don't involve making products. So, for example, if someone came to me and they said hey, I'm a classroom teacher, I'm going to make an example video for you. Maybe you really enjoy creating classroom content, you enjoy talking about different products or resources that you're using inside of your classroom, along with tips for how to use and implement those resources. You can create content for business owners to use in their ads or in their stories or in their reels, and sell that content to them. So you can say hey, lauren, here's an example of how I might use your product, and it can be a stock example where you've used somebody else's product and you can pitch it and say like hey, here's an example of how I might use your resource to advertise your products to my audience, or to just advertise your products, right. And you can say I will create 10 videos like this for you, package deal 500 bucks or like whatever it is right, and then I have content that I can use to market my products without ever having to make that content. So you could say I'll make one video a month for you for $100 a month. I'll make one video for you that you can use to post as a reel, as an example of teachers in the classroom who are using your resources.
Speaker 1:If you can get 10 people to agree to 10 videos a month, like 10 30 to 60 second reels on Instagram or 30 to 60 second TikToks, you don't have to have the audience available. You can just agree that you're going to just create the content for them to use in their own marketing, and so you don't have to have an existing audience. You're just creating the content and you get 10 people to say yes to 30 to 60 second video for $100 a month. Boom, you're at $1,000 a month, creating content, not having to build your own audience, but just having the ability to shoot the content and say hey, here's this product that I'm really loving, that I'm using inside of my classroom these morning worksheets for preschool, and here's why I'm really loving that I'm using inside of my classroom these morning worksheets for preschool, and here's why I'm loving them. And then three reasons why you love it in 30 seconds and boom, you're done. And then I can take that piece of content, I can put it on my social media platform and boom, I'm done. It took you just a few minutes to do it, but I understand that. Setting up the lighting and doing all of that right, it takes you a few minutes to do it in your classroom. I don't have a classroom. I'm not using it with students. I'm using it as a homeschool mom, so I get the benefit of having a teacher talk about using this in their classroom. I'm getting basically a video rating of my product from the mouth of a classroom teacher or from the mouth of my ideal customer, and I love it.
Speaker 1:So that's another way that you could think about marketing for other sellers, or maybe even writing blog posts. If you know of a teacher author or a teacher business owner who has an active blog, a lot of times they hire out their blog posts and so you could come up with a list of five different blog posts that you could write for them over five different topics and say like, hey, I'm gonna be creating blog posts on these topics. Here's an example of a blog that I've written before. I can create one blog for you a month, or can I write this blog post for you? Would you be interested in purchasing it? If I write the blog post and it's something you're interested in, then I'll sell it to you for X amount of money and so you can write for them and you can pitch that without even creating anything yet.
Speaker 1:Do you see what I'm saying? So, like you create like one example video, one example product, one example blog post, and then you can pitch those things out and see if it gets any traction, before having to create all of this content yourself, and you can potentially build recurring revenue for yourself and for your business, because if I love that one 30 second video that you did and I want you to do one every month, then I'm going to continue to pay you to create a video for me every month? If I love that product that you created for me, I know that I can come back to you and get more of those products. Or if I love that blog post that you wrote, I know I can come back to you and get more blog posts from you. You can continue to pitch to me every single month. Does that make sense? So there are so many different ways that you can create content for established business owners, help them grow their business, without having an established audience of your own, without having to put a lot of time and effort and energy into the thing up front before knowing whether or not you're going to get paid for it. You're not having to create 10 products and list them on TPT and hope that they sell. You can create one product, get someone to purchase on commission all 10 products, for example and then you create those products for them once someone has purchased them from you, or you create that video content for them once they've purchased that from you.
Speaker 1:I actually got the idea for this this morning as I was listening to a podcast episode, de-influenced, actually, from content creators and influencers, and they were talking about how there is a strategy in the influencing space that if you want to start making money right away but you don't have an audience, then you can reach out to brands and you can say hey, I will create a video of me using your shampoo, for example, or using your flat iron, or whatever that you can use for your own advertising. You can use as a customer sort of, as a customer review or an example of maybe how your product works from the ideal customer's perspective. And they were talking about how lucrative that is for both the business and for the individual. And I thought, oh my gosh, you could so do this in the TPT online space, because there are a lot of people on both ends who would be really interested in that but might not necessarily be seeking it out. Okay, so let's recap that you can sell your own resources on Teachers Pay Teachers. You can create resources for other TPT sellers, or you can create marketing content for established sellers and you can sell that marketing content for them without having to have an audience and create recurring revenue for your new business.
Speaker 1:All right, you can find a link down in the description below to that Facebook group that I mentioned earlier.
Speaker 1:You can also find my contact information. If something here resonated with you and you are in the pre-K space, you're a pre-K mom or you're a preschool teacher or you are a secondary math teacher and you're interested in creating content for me, pitch it to me absolutely. Like, I will take it. No, I'm promising that I'm gonna be able to take everybody to make a purchase from everyone, or even from anyone but it's something that I'm really open to, and so if you wanna get a practice pitch in, you can send it my way. Absolutely. You'll find my contact information down in the description and a link to that Facebook group for TPT Virtual Assistance. Thanks so much for being here, you guys. If you want to learn more about creating a Teachers Pay Teachers store or creating resources for teacher business owners, you want to make sure you're subscribed so that you can get more weekly content sent to you. Thanks so much for being here, you guys. I'm going to see you right back here next week.